Odor stimuli are reliable elicitors of emotional expression and odor-vision interactions may occur early in development. Here, we investigated the infants' ability to match affective valence of pleasant/aversive odors and happy/disgusted faces. Overall, 3- to 7-month-old infants were biased toward the disgust faces. However, this bias reversed toward a bias for smiling faces in the context of a pleasant odorant for the 3-month-old infants.

We show that the spontaneous oscillatory activity recorded by magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used to explore functional connectivity in childhood. Furthermore, the strength of particular connections at rest is significantly associated with children's spatial working memory capacity, as measured outside the scanner.

Learning to read in French (an opaque orthography), but not in Spanish (a transparent orthography), in addition to Basque (a transparent orthography) favors the use of large grain lexical strategies to read difficult items in Basque: the lexical effect on reading improbable Basque items was larger in the French-Basque bilinguals than in the Spanish-Basque bilinguals.

This figure indicates that Indian adults believe that members of lower castes are more willing to interact with members of higher castes than the reverse, indicating their understanding of the asymmetrical nature of the caste hierarchy. The present study finds that, beginning at least in middle school and continuing into adulthood, individuals who placed more importance on caste were more likely to adopt deterministic intuitive theories. We also found a developmental change in thescope of this relationship, such that in children, caste attitudes were linked only to abstract beliefs about personal freedom, but hat by adulthood, caste attitudes were also linked to beliefs about the potential achievement of members of different castes, personal intellectual ability, and personality attributes.

This is the first study to show that infants prefer listening to infant speech sounds over adult speech sounds. We indexed listening preferences in pre-babbling infants by measuring by how long they fixated on a static visual pattern presented in tandem with either an infant vowel sound or an adult vowel sound, as shown in this figure. Probing further we found that infants prefer both the voice pitch (f0) and the formant structure of infant speech sounds. This perceptual bias favoring infant vocal properties may help to illuminate important aspects of infant speech and language development. There has been a great deal of research focused on how infants perceive speech produced by adults, but if we want to understand how infants learn to monitor and perceive the speech they themselves produce, we need to study how they perceive infant speech signals, too.

We report robust performance gains and skill retention after practice in a tactile braille letter discrimination task in dyslexic individuals and their typical reading peers. The figure shows group averaged braille letter discrimination time (a) and the number of errors (b) for each block in the initial training session, at 24 hours post-training and in a test conducted two weeks post-training. The small initial advantage of the typical readers was not apparent in the latter two time points.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds watched the experimenter performing one-by-one insertion of ‘food tokens’ into an opaque animal puppet and then were asked to imitate the puppet-feeding behavior. Chidlren who focused on numerosity (Focusers) displayed a response distributions centered on the target numerosities and showed the classic variability signature that is attributed to the Approximate Number System. This shows that pre-counting children are capable of sequentially updating the numerosity of non-visible sets through additive operations and hold it in memory for reproducing the observed behavior.

A neural mirror system predicts that developments in infants' motor experience should be associated with the strength of EEG mu desynchronization during action observation.To explore this, 9-month-old infants reached for toys and observed an experimenter reaching for toys while EEG activity was recorded in the mu frequency band. We found greater mu desynchronization in scalp electrodes located over motor-related regions during action observation was associated with greater reach-grasp competence, suggesting an early emerging neural system integrating one's own actions with the perception of others' actions.

We show that children as young as two can successfully learn a new word by inferring its relation to the surrounding discourse, although there are important developmental changes in children's ability to learn words from the discourse context. These data show that sophisticated inferential and pragmatic abilities may underlie children's early word learning.

Using a psychophysical approach combined with well-controlled face stimuli, we reveal a fine-grained mapping of the development of facial expression recognition for all six basic emotions and a neutral expression, from 5 years of age up to adulthood. Model fitting identified the recognition trajectories of the six basic emotions into three distinct groupings: expressions that show a steep improvement with age – disgust, neutral, and anger; expressions that show a more gradual improvement with age – sadness, surprise; and those that remain stable from early childhood – happiness and fear, indicating that the coding for these expressions is already mature by 5 years of age. This approach significantly increases our understanding of the decoding of emotions across development and offers a novel tool to measure impairments for specific facial expressions in developmental clinical populations.

Despite the fact that attentional orienting has been extensively studied in infancy, the zooming mechanism -- namely, the ability to distribute the attentional resources to a small or large portion of the visual field -- has never been tested before. Our results demonstrated, for the first time, that 8-month-old infants can rapidly adjust the attentional focus size during a pre-saccadic temporal window.

The present investigation examined the sexual dimorphic patterns of cardiorespiratory fitness to working memory in preadolescent children. Data were collected in three separate studies utilizing unique measures of working memory (i.e. the operation span task, the n-back task, or the Sternberg task). Results from all three samples revealed that higher cardiorespiratory fitness levels were associated with better working memory performance only for males with no such relation observed for females.

We examined the relation of parental socioeconomic status (SES) to the neural bases of subtraction in school-age children (9- to 12-year-olds). We independently localized brain regions subserving verbal versus visuo-spatial representations to determine whether the parental SES-related differences in children's reliance on these neural representations varies as a function of math skill. At higher SES levels, higher skill was associated with greater recruitment of the left temporal cortex, identified by the verbal localizer. At lower SES levels, higher skill was associated with greater recruitment of right parietal cortex, identified by the visuo-spatial localizer. This suggests that depending on parental SES, children engage different neural systems to solve subtraction problems.

Many studies have shown a consonant bias in lexical processing in both infants and adults such that vowels are given less weight. The consonant bias has been assumed to be language-general. In the present study, Danish-learning infants were able to learn word pairs differing by a single vowel but not a single consonant, thereby showing a vowel bias. The result could be explained by the highly ‘vocalic’ nature of Danish phonology and suggests that processing biases arise from the characteristics of the ambient language rather than being present from birth.

Social interactions occur quickly, requiring infants to recruit their knowledge of others' goals and intentions and initiate appropriate responses within a timeframe of mere seconds. The current study investigates the possibility that developments in social competence during the second year of life are related to increases in the speed with which infants can employ their understanding of others' intentions. Results indicate that the speed with which infants can recruit and deploy their knowledge about others' intentions is a critical predictor of their success during a social interaction.

We examined the developmental course of socioeconomic disparities in executive function and the features of childhood experience responsible for this association in the NICHD Study of Early Childcare. Lower family socioeconomic status (SES) predicts worse performance on tasks of executive function at the youngest age measured for each task, which was partially explained by characteristics of the home and family environment. SES does not predict the rate of growth of executive function across early and middle childhood, and thus early SES differences in executive function persist without accumulating or diminishing.

Nine-month-old infants show discrimination of 3 vs. 4 when the numerical signal is clear and presented amidst redundant information across a series of displays; infants fail to show robust discrimination of the same comparison when the numerical signal is noisy– presented amidst changing dimensions.

We report results indicating a lack of embodiment effects in ASD, and further, an association between embodiment differences and ASD symptomatology. The current results are consistent with an embodied account of ASD that goes beyond social experiences and could be driven by subtle deficits in sensorimotor coordination.

Preschool children's ability to learn two different tasks by imitation, emulation and individual learning significantly improved with age. However, these broad age-related changes were generally not associated with improvements in imitation fidelity. These results indicate that children's imitation performance is not mediated by domain-general learning processes but by domain-specific imitation mechanisms, specialized for copying either object- or motor/spatial-based rules.

Geometric re-orientation abilities seem to be common in most animal species. We tested chicks that were devoid of any previous experience of navigating in a geometrically structured environment to reorient towards a filial imprinting object in a working memory test. After disorientation, chicks showed search congruent with an encoding of the geometry of the environment. These results demonstrate that, at least in this precocial species, orientation by use of the geometry of the surfaces spatial layout is innately predisposed in the brain.

Children unlearn a category boundary, they drift, when the distribution of examples encountered during testing does not match that of training. Feedback on the correct boundary is more effective at reducing drift for older children than for younger. Children's sensitivity to the distribution of unlabeled items may lead them to be less accurate in certain categorization tasks, but may prepare them for broader learning since distributional information is important for many real-world categorization behaviors.

The constraints on statistically based acquisition were explored in four different experiments. The results establish for the first time that constellations of multiple phonological features, defining broad consonant classes, constrain the early acquisition of phonotactic regularities of the native language

Human beings have remarkable skills of self-control, but the evolutionary origins of these skills are unknown. This study investigates the evolutionary bases, as well as the developmental changes, of humans?reactivity and self-regulatory skills. Human children at 3 and 6 years of age were systematically compared with one of humans' two nearest relatives, chimpanzees, on a battery of six tasks. Three-year-old children and chimpanzees were very similar in their abilities to resist an impulse for immediate gratification (when that led to greater rewards later), repeat a previously successful action (when the situation had changed), attend to a distracting noise (when concentrating on a problem), and quit in the face of repeated failure. Six-year-old children were more skillful than either three-year-olds or chimpanzees at controlling their impulses. These results suggest that humans' most fundamental skills of self-control - as part of the overall decision-making process - are a part of their general great ape heritage, and that their species-unique skills of self-control begin at around the age at which many children begin formal schooling.

Short Reports

Compares majority and proficiency biases in young children. Shows children will exhibit a majority bias, but not when it is inefficient, highlighting for the first time that children will copy to affiliate with a social group, though not if there is a cost to them doing so.

Papers

We investigated whether young children are able to infer affiliative relations and relative status from observing others' imitative interactions. Children watched videos showing one individual imitating another and were asked about the relationship between those individuals. Experiment 1 showed that 5-year-olds assume that individuals imitate people they like. Experiment 2 showed that children of the same age assume that an individual who imitates is relatively lower in status. Thus, although there are many advantages to imitating others, there may also be reputational costs. Younger children, 4-year-olds, did not reliably make either inference. Taken together, these experiments demonstrate that imitation conveys valuable information about third party relationships and that, at least by the age of 5, children are able to use this information in order to infer who is allied with whom and who is dominant over whom. In doing so, they add a new dimension to our understanding of the role of imitation in human social life.

How do young children decide when to ask for help? We investigated this question by having preschoolers complete an identical perceptual discrimination task under two conditions: a standard condition in which they were forced to answer independently, and a help condition in which they could ask for help. Participants asked for help on trials for which, when they were forced to answer independently in the standard condition, they were least confident and accurate; this suggests they used available help to judiciously to improve their overall performance. Although perceived helper competence did not affect overt performance, participants in a ‘bad helper’ condition were slower to respond after receiving help compared to those in a ‘good helper’ condition.

We investigated whether and how the infant's behaviour affects the mother's action during an interaction. Analyses revealed that spatial characteristics of the mother's task demonstration (cup-nesting task) clearly changed depending on the infant's object manipulation. In particular, the variation by the mother's motion decreased after the infant's task-relevant manipulation (i.e., cup nesting) and increased after the infant's task-irrelevant manipulation (e.g., cup banging). This pattern was not observed for mothers with 6- to 8-month-olds, who do not have the fine motor skill to perform the action. Results indicate that the infant's action skill dynamically affects the infant-directed action and suggest that the mother is sensitive to the infant's potential to learn a novel action.

Three- to 6-year-old children learned facts about unfamiliar target children who varied in either gender or race and were asked to remember which facts went with which targets. Children showed automatic encoding of gender by 4 years of age, but did not show evidence of automatic encoding of race.

7-month-old infants learnt to spin a turntable to bring back into reach a toy that was either behind an opaque screen and thus hidden, or was behind a transparent screen and thus visible but out-of-reach. Before and after this training, infants performed an object permanence search task where a toy was hidden in a hiding-well. Infants who learnt to spin the turntable with the opaque screen showed the greatest improvement on the search task. We argue this was a result of them learning how their own actions can affect the visibility of hidden objects.

Papers

The experiences of social partners are important motivators of social action. Can infants use such experiences to make predictions about how social agents will behave? In three studies, following initial instances of conflict between individual members of different social pairs, sixteen-month-old infants looked longer when those individuals' social partners–who had never previously interacted–cooperated rather than conflicted with one other. Thus, infants tracked the agents' third-person allegiances and inferred that the conflict would generalize across social partnerships.

In this paper we report a brain-based study of emotion processing in juvenile offenders. Male adolescent offenders and age-matched non-offenders passively viewed emotional images whilst their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography. As expected, the Late Positive Potential (LPP) was significantly enhanced following unpleasant images for non-offenders. However, for juvenile offenders, the LPP did not differ across image categories (as highlighted in the grey box). Juvenile offenders thus showed emotional hypo-reactivity to the unpleasant images, indicative of altered emotional processing. These results have the potential to inform interventions for juvenile offending.

Short Reports

Estimation bias is ubiquitous in perception and cognition. Many biases, such as those observed when children and adults mark remembered spatial locations, have been explained in terms of complex Bayesian models. Here we show that these biases are more simply explained by a psychophysical model of proportion estimation.

Papers

The present study probes the geometric information that 4-year-old children use to interpret perspectival line drawings and photographs such as the ones pictured here. Although each picture presents a scene or an object from a highly canonical and familiar viewpoint, children interpret these pictures by relying either on the geometry they use for navigation or object recognition, respectively. Young children thus appear to flexibly recruit core geometric representations to interpret spatial symbols of varying degrees of iconicity, but they show no evidence of combining geometric information across spatial contexts to form integrated representations of scenes and objects.

Greater developmental increases in English than in Chinese in left superior temporal gyrus and left inferior temporal gyrus, suggesting phonological processing and fine-grained word form recognition is essential in English reading. Greater developmental increase in right middle occipital gyrus in Chinese than in English, suggesting holistic visuo-orthographic processing is essential in Chinese reading.

Compared to their typically developing peers and adults, children with a history of SLI (H-SLI) showed normal attenuation of the N1 component to audiovisual speech but reduced susceptibility to the McGurk illusion. We conclude that, when present, audiovisual integration difficulty in the H-SLI group stems from a later (non-sensory) stage of processing.

This longitudinal study examined the predictive value of the late positive potential (LPP), an ERP that has been shown to be sensitive to reappraisal, as an indicator of observed emotion regulation strategy use in children. Five- to seven- year old children completed a computerized cognitive reappraisal task while EEG was continuously recorded, as well as two emotionally challenging behavioral tasks, during which emotion regulation strategy use was observed. Two years later, the children again completed the same challenging behavioral tasks. Children who showed reappraisal-induced reductions in the LPP during the first assessment also used significantly more adaptive emotion regulation strategies, both concurrently and two years later.

This study aimed to determine whether conceptual learning between 6 and 9 months leads to sustained behavioral advantages and neural changes in childhood. Here, children who received individual-level training with monkey faces (all monkey faces were individually named) from 6-9 months of age, showed an adult-like Event-related potential (ERP) inversion effect for human faces relative to children with no training, or who were trained with strollers or were trained at the category level with monkey faces.

The current study examined visual attention biases using a dot-probe paradigm in 8-year-old children who were part of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP). Children in the foster care intervention had a significantly larger positive bias when compared to the care-as-usual group. The magnitude of positive bias was predicted by age of placement into foster care and was associated with reduced psychiatric and social risk for children who experienced early psychosocial deprivation.

Adults experience less variable and intense emotions than adolescents, suggesting that age predicts an improved ability to regulate one-s emotions. The present study found that adults showed greater concurrent and sustained reductions in the amygdala response during cognitive regulation of emotion relative to adolescents. These results suggest that not only are adults more successful at cognitively regulating emotional responses in the moment, but that emotion regulation has a more lasting impact for them than for adolescents as well.

In this study we conducted moment-by-moment analyses of 16- 18-month-olds' looking and reaching behavior as measures of early knowledge in a two-alternative forced-choice word-picture matching task to determine the speed with which a word was processed (visual reaction time) as a function of the type of haptic response: Target, Distractor, or No Touch. Participants were significantly slower at processing a word during No Touches compared to Distractor and Target Touches. These results suggest that incorrect and absent haptic responses appear to index distinct knowledge states..

Motor-sensory recalibration is an important mechanism for the process of causal attribution. In this study we showed that this mechanism develops late in humans owing to the poor temporal resolution in motor-sensory synchronization in children younger than 12 years of age.

Visual exploration in infants and adults has been studied using two very different paradigms: free viewing of flat screen displays in desk-mounted eye-tracking studies and real-world visual guidance of action in head-mounted eye-tracking studies. To test whether classic findings from screen-based studies generalize to real-world visual exploration and to compare natural visual exploration in infants and adults, we tested observers in a new paradigm that combines critical aspects of both previous techniques: free viewing during real-world visual exploration. Mothers and their 9-month-old infants wore head-mounted eye trackers while mothers carried their infants in a forward-facing infant carrier through a series of indoor hallways. Results indicate that several aspects of visual exploration of a flat screen display do not generalize to visual exploration in the real world.

How might children grasp the gist of a visual scene? We found that, even at 4-5 years-of-age, children engage a visual mechanism known as ensemble coding to summarize and perceive the average size of a group of objects.

Theory of Mind understanding (ToM) and Executive Functioning skills (EF) are compared among three diverse groups of Iranian children, including unschooled children from mountain village. While all children showed similar levels of ToM understanding, EF skills were highly related to children′s socio-economic status. The results provide support to the ‘Emergence account’ explaining the association between ToM and EF.

We exposed a group of 24-month-old English-learning toddlers to variability in indexical cues (very diverse voices from native English talkers), and another to variability in social cues (very diverse-looking silent actors); neither group was familiarized with the target novel accent. At test, both groups succeeded in recognizing a novel word when spoken in the novel accent. Thus, even when no lexical cues are available, variability can prepare young children for non-standard pronunciations.

The Magic Carpet (top-right) is a novel test for locomotor navigation, derived from the traditional Corsi Block-tapping Task (top-left). Spatial sequences of identical shape are retrieved differently in navigational from reaching space. The analysis of errors on the two tests reveals that school-age children, unlike adults, are unable to spontaneously select specific memory strategies for navigational space (bottom).

It has been proposed that consonants and vowels have different functional roles in language processing and, in particular, that consonants are more important in distinguishing words in the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003). Many studies on French provide convrgent support for this proposal in adulthood and toddlerhood (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005; New et al., 2014). We investigated the relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition in French-learning 5-month-old infants. Reactions to mispronunciation in their own name were compared whether the change was consonantal (e.g. Victor/Zictor, n = 30) or vocalic (e.g. Alix/Elix, n = 30). Behavioral results indicated sensitivity to vowel changes, and not to consonant changes. Detailed acoustic analyses of THE stimuli revealed that vowels were more salient but spectrally less distinct than consonants. Lastly, vowel (but not consonant) mispronunciation detection was modulated by acoustic factors, in particular by the spectrally-based distance. This shows that the consonant bias for lexical processing observed later in development does not emerge until after 5 months of age through additional language exposure.

The relation of very preterm birth and early parenting to EC at age 6 was tested. VPT, higher parent intrusiveness and lower parent-child synchrony predicted lower EC, which in turn correlated with academic achievement at age 9 years.

Chinese kindergarten children are initially biased to categorize racially ambiguous faces: They categorize such faces as other-race “African” when the faces display an angry expression but the same faces as own-race “Chinese” when the faces display a happy expression. However, after learning to individuate African faces, the implicit racial bias disappears. Thus, perceptual learning of individual other-race faces can serve as an effective method to reduce implicit racial bias in young children.

We show that two-year-olds selectively enact, in a new social situation, causal functions which have been demonstrated pedagogically, even when they have learned and can produce alternate functions as well. The results have implications for how children learn conventional object functions in ambiguous contexts, as well as suggest a way which children might naturally participate in cultural transmission.

Adults with Down syndrome (DS) exhibit specific deficits in learning and memory processes that depend on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, however it is largely unclear how these processes develop in young children with DS. We tested preschoolers with DS on these areas, and as shown in the figure, they performed equivalently to mental-age matched controls. This finding suggests that the additional disability-specific learning and memory deficits seen in adulthood, are not yet evident in pre-schoolers with DS and likely emerge progressively with age.

We investigated reliance on social information, contingent on task difficulty and the consensus amongst informants, in children aged 3–7 using the “who-has-more” task. Whilst all children were sensitive to unanimity, older children were also sensitive to intermediate majorities (e.g., 8v2 informants). Children were relatively insensitive to task difficulty and older children tended to stick with their own decisions. Despite this, only the older children were able to use the social information to improve their accuracy..

Individuals with Williams syndrome performed better than a matched subset of typically developing children on more difficult routes. Measures of attention and long-term memory were strongly associated with route learning. All of the groups, including 5- to 6-year-old typically developing children, demonstrated the ability to make use of various landmark types to aid route learning, including distant landmarks.

Short Reports

We find that children dislike plagiarism because it harms an other's reputation. They think it is wrong for one to falsely take credit for others' good ideas, but not bad to help other people's reputation by falsely giving them credit for one's own good idea.

The development of Israeli children's essentialist beliefs about ethnicity is most strongly related not to their parents' own beliefs, political ideology, or explicit endorsement of ethnic stereotypes. Rather, it is related to the extent to which their parents' label and make generic statements about ethnicity.

This study examined error-related negativity (ERN) in a sample of 234 children assessed at 3 timepoints: kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades. At each timepoint, ERN was examined as the average amplitude across trials, as well as decomposed into components reflecting signal strength (theta power) and the temporal consistency (signal phase coherence) across trials, both of which contributed independently to the average amplitude measure. Across the 3 timepoints, increases in trial-to-trial temporal consistency resulted in increases in average ERN amplitude despite a significant decline in average signal strength across the same developmental period.

We compared associations between specific effortful control subcomponents and stress-induced cortisol trajectories in preschool children residing in the U.S. and China. U.S. preschoolers showed an expected negative association between maternal-rated inhibitory control with cortisol reactivity and recovery. In contrast, Chinese preschoolers showed a positive association between maternal-rated attentional focusing and cortisol reactivity.

In a classic shape-bias paradigm, three and four-year-old children with typical language (TL) or Specific Language Impairment (SLI) saw an example object and then chose another from a set of three in Similarity Classification (‘See this? Which one goes with this one?’) and Novel Name Extension (‘See this? This is a [dax]', Find another [dax]') conditions. Children with TL replicated the classic pattern (random choices in Similarity Classification, large bias for shape in Name Extension), but those with SLI showed no apparent difference. This suggests that children with SLI fail to detect coherent covariation between linguistic and nonlinguistic properties that accelerates object name learning among their peers with TL. In a paired visual association task, children with TL showed significant learning over 4 days, but children with SLI did not. Performance in this task predicted individuals' shape bias better than any assessment, suggesting impairments of nonlinguistic learning abilities contributes to linguistic difficulties in SLI.

What perceptual features do children use to categorize by race? Past research has suggested that adult-like abilities to racially classify emerge quite early in development. Our findings suggest this is not the case; younger children rely almost entirely on skin color, with little or no attention to other aspects of facial physiognomy.

Infants greatly rely on the visual information that specifies self-motion as they increasingly become mobile during the first year of life. By using high-density EEG, the paper provides evidence for the perceptual development and processing of such visual motion information, where crawling infants' visual motion perception is clearly aided by the structured information from optic flow as opposed to random motion.

We examined brain responses and connectivity during addition and subtraction problem solving in typically developing children and children with developmental dyscalculia (DD). Contrary to expectations of reduced activity in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) for children with DD, we found hyper-activity specifically for subtraction problems. Effective connectivity analyses revealed hyper-connectivity, rather than reduced connectivity, between the IPS and lateral fronto-parietal and default mode networks in children with DD during both tasks. These findings suggest the IPS and its circuits are a major locus of dysfunction during arithmetic problem solving in DD, and that inappropriate task modulation and hyper-connectivity, rather than under-engagement, are the neural mechanisms underlying dyscalculia.

When identifying the gender of a face, participants with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) had a smaller ERNdiff (difference in Error-Related Negativity amplitude between correct and incorrect responses) than participants with typical development. However, when identifying the affect of a face, participants with and without ASD did not differ on ERNdiff.

Short Reports

Dyads were presented with a task where two balls had to be inserted into the same of four boxes. When children got a ball each and had to coordinate their choices without communication (experimental condition) they were more likely to choose the most salient box than when they could choose independently (control condition).

It is still unclear how the visual system perceives accurately the size of objects at different distances. One suggestion, dating back to Berkeley’s famous essay, is that vision is calibrated by touch. If so, we may expect different mechanisms involved for near, reachable distances and far, unreachable distances. To study how the haptic system calibrates vision we measured size constancy in children (from 6 to 16 years of age) and adults, at various distances.